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As I read The story of My Experiments with Truth, the real man behind the moniker of Mahatma became alive. Gandhiji had many great people like Leo Tolstoy, Swami Vivekanand and Rabindranath Tagore as his contemporaries. And, as expected from a clever bania, he made full use of the good luck he was bestowed with, accepting the ill fortune of being born in bad times. While reading his autobiography, I could clearly feel the imprints of his worthy contemporaries and I would like to share a few thoughts of Gandhiji I admired:

1. Disinterested service of people in any sphere ultimately helps the country politically.

2. The face of truth is hidden behind the golden veil of maya.

3. A mind consciously unclean can not be cleansed by fasting.

4. He who would go in for novel experiments must begin with himself.

5. A poet is one who can call forth the good latent in the human breast.

6. Poets do not influence all alike, for everyone is not evolved in a equal measure.

7. If one’s heart is pure, calamity brings in its train men and measures to fight it.

8. Nothing once begun should be abandoned unless it is proved to be morally wrong.

9. I am not writing the autobiography to please critics. Writing is itself one of the experiments with truth.

10. Hate the sin and not the sinner.

11. The woes of Mahatmas are known to Mahatmas alone.

12. How heavy is the toll of sins and wrongs that wealth, power and prestige exact from man.

13. Involuntary thought is an affection of the mind, and curbing of thought, therefore means curbing of mind which is even more difficult to curb than the wind.

14. Brahmacharya means control of the senses in thought, word and deed.

15. A permanent fund carries in itself the seed of the moral fall of the institution.

16. It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honored by the humiliation of their fellow beings.

17. The real seat of taste is not the tongue, but the mind.

18. A clean confession, combined with a promise never to commit the sin again, when offered before one who has the right to receive it, is the purest type of repentance.

19. A reformer cannot afford to have close intimacy with him whom he seeks to reform.

20. True friendship is an identity of souls rarely to be found in this world.